As to professionalism, I'm gonna have to revert to my Office Space quote. "You work hard enough not to get fired". This whole professionalism crap is unfunded altruism. Human beings work by incentives. Monetary compensation is a basic one, as it is one's means to attain your hierarchy of needs. The starving artist is an illusion.
Nobody gives 100% for free. People do it for compensation, or in the case of pilots for the "promise of compensation". But nobody does it, when rationally and with lower tier needs not met yet, for free. Therefore the whole "do it for work ethic" is misguided. When there isn't adequate compensation for the valued effort nor does the promise of compensation exists anymore, it is irrational to provide the same amount of effort as one did when the former conditions were true.
I worked a retail catalog department while completing a graduate degree. I got paid crap. They needed somebody with a pulse and able to appease screaming customers. Criminal records were ok. I didn't have a criminal record so I was a god-send to these people. They knew I was overqualified, they didn't care, nor did I. Did I bust my hump? HEEEELLLL NO. I got paid crap.
I was therefore 15 minutes late regularly and left the second my four hour shift was up. I was well liked by the customers and the job required one twentieth of my conscious attention span to accomplish. I did my job marginally which actually yielded above average results for their expectations, and was given the standard raise, which was still crap. I worked hard enough not to get fired. In the flying biz, that threshold is obviously considerably higher due to the technical nature of the work performed, but outside that higher datum plane, there is no rational reason these people should go above and beyond. If you think the extra effort gets you the cookie in a business whose goal is to have every employee be a carbon copy of each other (standarization, the achiles heel of pilot compensation), then you're a fool. When you get paid 21K with the explicit knowledge you are not going to break 100K in ten years and will probably be out of that employment within said 10 years, you have no rational need nor incentive to work harder than hard enough not to get fired. Some of you bellyache about that philosophy. You know what the rational thing to do is? It's to actually not take the 21K job in the first place! Irrational is to take the job and conduct yourself as if you were able to satisfy your needs with it, where you clearly cannot. But this is America, we can't accept we couldn't possibly make a living out of our affection for riding roller coasters (proverbially speaking). Life is soo unfair
